With the explosive growth of data traffic on the Internet and corporate enterprise networks, corporations and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) demand faster routing switches that can meet the increasing traffic demands. However, in order to provide a high-speed device at a reasonable cost, manufacturers of routers and switches have generally met the demands for faster packet processing speeds and the demands of higher communication bandwidth by improving the hardware processing speed of each component within the routers and switches. With the advent of optical networks, this methodology is beginning to fail to meet the traffic demands of newly implemented networks.
Gigabit routing speeds are required for meeting the bandwidth demands of higher capacity networks. As optical networks are employed for higher density data traffic using increasingly more wavelengths per optical fiber, current architectures for routing switches are failing to meet the needs of this data traffic. In addition, the current generation of routing switches have become increasingly complex in the communication and computational overhead required among its internal components.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a method and apparatus for increasing the speed of a routing switch while decreasing the internal complexity of the component communication. It would be further advantageous if the architecture were scalable to meet the increasing demands of optical networks.